The Common Reader, Second Series, by Virginia Woolf

William Hazlitt

Had one met Hazlitt no doubt one would have liked him on his own principle that “We can scarcely
hate anyone we know”. But Hazlitt has been dead now a hundred years, and it is perhaps a question how far we can know
him well enough to overcome those feelings of dislike, both personal and intellectual, which his writings still so
sharply arouse. For Hazlitt — it is one of his prime merits — was not one of those noncommittal writers who shuffle off
in a mist and die of their own insignificance. His essays are emphatically himself. He has no reticence and he has no
shame. He tells us exactly what he thinks, and he tells us — the confidence is less seductive — exactly what he feels.
As of all men he had the most intense consciousness of his own existence, since never a day passed without inflicting
on him some pang of hate or of jealousy, some thrill of anger or of pleasure, we cannot read him for long without
coming in contact with a very singular character — ill-conditioned yet high-minded; mean yet noble; intensely
egotistical yet inspired by the most genuine passion for the rights and liberties of mankind.

Soon, so thin is the veil of the essay as Hazlitt wore it, his very look comes before us. We see him as Coleridge
saw him, “brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange”. He comes shuffling into the room, he looks nobody straight in the
face, he shakes hands with the fin of a fish; occasionally he darts a malignant glance from his corner. “His manners
are 99 in 100 singularly repulsive”, Coleridge said. Yet now and again his face lit up with intellectual beauty, and
his manner became radiant with sympathy and understanding. Soon, too, as we read on, we become familiar with the whole
gamut of his grudges and his grievances. He lived, one gathers, mostly at inns. No woman’s form graced his board. He
had quarrelled with all his old friends, save perhaps with Lamb. Yet his only fault had been that he had stuck to his
principles and “not become a government tool”. He was the object of malignant persecution — Blackwood’s reviewers
called him “pimply Hazlitt”, though his cheek was pale as alabaster. These lies, however, got into print, and then he
was afraid to visit his friends because the footman had read the newspaper and the housemaid tittered behind his back.
He had — no one could deny it — one of the finest minds, and he wrote indisputably the best prose style of his time.
But what did that avail with women? Fine ladies have no respect for scholars, nor chambermaids either — so the growl
and plaint of his grievances keeps breaking through, disturbing us, irritating us; and yet there is something so
independent, subtle, fine, and enthusiastic about him — when he can forget himself he is so rapt in ardent speculation
about other things — that dislike crumbles and turns to something much warmer and more complex. Hazlitt was right:

It is the mask only that we dread and hate; the man may have something human about him! The notions in short which
we entertain of people at a distance, or from partial representation, or from guess-work, are simple, uncompounded
ideas, which answer to nothing in reality; those which we derive from experience are mixed modes, the only true and, in
general, the most favourable ones.

Certainly no one could read Hazlitt and maintain a simple and uncompounded idea of him. From the first he was a
twy-minded man — one of those divided natures which are inclined almost equally to two quite opposite careers. It is
significant that his first impulse was not to essay-writing but to painting and philosophy. There was something in the
remote and silent art of the painter that offered a refuge to his tormented spirit. He noted enviously how happy the
old age of painters was —“their minds keep alive to the last”; he turned longingly to the calling that takes one out of
doors, among fields and woods, that deals with bright pigments, and has solid brush and canvas for its tools and not
merely black ink and white paper. Yet at the same time he was bitten by an abstract curiosity that would not let him
rest in the contemplation of concrete beauty. When he was a boy of fourteen he heard his father, the good Unitarian
minister, dispute with an old lady of the congregation as they were coming out of Meeting as to the limits of religious
toleration, and, he said, “it was this circumstance that decided the fate of my future life”. It set him off “forming
in my head . . . the following system of political rights and general jurisprudence”. He wished “to be
satisfied of the reason of things”. The two ideals were ever after to clash. To be a thinker and to express in the
plainest and most accurate of terms “the reason of things”, and to be a painter gloating over blues and crimsons,
breathing fresh air and living sensually in the emotions — these were two different, perhaps incompatible ideals, yet
like all Hazlitt’s emotions both were tough and each strove for mastery. He yielded now to one, now to the other. He
spent months in Paris copying pictures at the Louvre. He came home and toiled laboriously at the portrait of an old
woman in a bonnet day after day, seeking by industry and pains to discover the secret of Rembrandt’s genius; but he
lacked some quality — perhaps it was invention — and in the end cut the canvas to ribbons in a rage or turned it
against the wall in despair. At the same time he was writing the “Essay on the Principles of Human Action” which he
preferred to all his other works. For there he wrote plainly and truthfully, without glitter or garishness, without any
wish to please or to make money, but solely to gratify the urgency of his own desire for truth. Naturally, “the book
dropped still-born from the press”. Then, too, his political hopes, his belief that the age of freedom had come and
that the tyranny of kingship was over, proved vain. His friends deserted to the Government, and he was left to uphold
the doctrines of liberty, fraternity, and revolution in that perpetual minority which requires so much self-approval to
support it.

Thus he was a man of divided tastes and of thwarted ambition; a man whose happiness, even in early life, lay behind.
His mind had set early and bore for ever the stamp of first impressions. In his happiest moods he looked not forwards
but backwards — to the garden where he had played as a child, to the blue hills of Shropshire and to all those
landscapes which he had seen when hope was still his, and peace brooded upon him and he looked up from his painting or
his book and saw the fields and woods as if they were the outward expression of his own inner quietude. It is to the
books that he read then that he returns — to Rousseau and to Burke and to the Letters of Junius. The impression that
they made upon his youthful imagination was never effaced and scarcely overlaid; for after youth was over he ceased to
read for pleasure, and youth and the pure and intense pleasures of youth were soon left behind.

Naturally, given his susceptibility to the charms of the other sex, he married; and naturally, given his
consciousness of his own “misshapen form made to be mocked”, he married unhappily. Miss Sarah Stoddart pleased him when
he met her at the Lambs by the common sense with which she found the kettle and boiled it when Mary absentmindedly
delayed. But of domestic talents she had none. Her little income was insufficient to meet the burden of married life,
and Hazlitt soon found that instead of spending eight years in writing eight pages he must turn journalist and write
articles upon politics and plays and pictures and books of the right length, at the right moment. Soon the mantelpiece
of the old house at York Street where Milton had lived was scribbled over with ideas for essays. As the habit proves,
the house was not a tidy house, nor did geniality and comfort excuse the lack of order. The Hazlitts were to be found
eating breakfast at two in the afternoon, without a fire in the grate or a curtain to the window. A valiant walker and
a clear-sighted woman, Mrs. Hazlitt had no delusions about her husband. He was not faithful to her, and she faced the
fact with admirable common sense. But “he said that I had always despised him and his abilities”, she noted in her
diary, and that was carrying common sense too far. The prosaic marriage came lamely to an end. Free at last from the
encumbrance of home and husband, Sarah Hazlitt pulled on her boots and set off on a walking tour through Scotland,
while Hazlitt, incapable of attachment or comfort, wandered from inn to inn, suffered tortures of humiliation and
disillusionment, but, as he drank cup after cup of very strong tea and made love to the innkeeper’s daughter, he wrote
those essays that are of course among the very best that we have.

That they are not quite the best — that they do not haunt the mind and remain entire in the memory as the essays of
Montaigne or Lamb haunt the mind — is also true. He seldom reaches the perfection of these great writers or their
unity. Perhaps it is the nature of these short pieces that they need unity and a mind at harmony with itself. A little
jar there makes the whole composition tremble. The essays of Montaigne, Lamb, even Addison, have the reticence which
springs from composure, for with all their familiarity they never tell us what they wish to keep hidden. But with
Hazlitt it is different. There is always something divided and discordant even in his finest essays, as if two minds
were at work who never succeed save for a few moments in making a match of it. In the first place there is the mind of
the inquiring boy who wishes to be satisfied of the reason of things — the mind of the thinker. It is the thinker for
the most part who is allowed the choice of the subject. He chooses some abstract idea, like Envy, or Egotism, or Reason
and Imagination. He treats it with energy and independence. He explores its ramifications and scales its narrow paths
as if it were a mountain road and the ascent both difficult and inspiring. Compared with this athletic progress, Lamb’s
seems the flight of a butterfly cruising capriciously among the flowers and perching for a second incongruously here
upon a barn, there upon a wheelbarrow. But every sentence in Hazlitt carries us forward. He has his end in view and,
unless some accident intervenes, he strides towards it in that “pure conversational prose style” which, as he points
out, is so much more difficult to practise than fine writing.

There can be no question that Hazlitt the thinker is an admirable companion. He is strong and fearless; he knows his
mind and he speaks his mind forcibly yet brilliantly too, for the readers of newspapers are a dull-eyed race who must
be dazzled in order to make them see. But besides Hazlitt the thinker there is Hazlitt the artist. There is the
sensuous and emotional man, with his feeling for colour and touch, with his passion for prizefighting and Sarah Walker,
with his sensibility to all those emotions which disturb the reason and make it often seem futile enough to spend one’s
time slicing things up finer and finer with the intellect when the body of the world is so firm and so warm and demands
so imperatively to be pressed to the heart. To know the reason of things is a poor substitute for being able to feel
them. And Hazlitt felt with the intensity of a poet. The most abstract of his essays will suddenly glow red-hot or
white-hot if something reminds him of his past. He will drop his fine analytic pen and paint a phrase or two with a
full brush brilliantly and beautifully if some landscape stirs his imagination or some book brings back the hour when
he first read it. The famous passages about reading Love for Love and drinking coffee from a silver pot, and reading La
Nouvelle Héloïse and eating a cold chicken, are known to all, and yet how oddly they often break into the context, how
violently we are switched from reason to rhapsody — how embarrassingly our austere thinker falls upon our shoulders and
demands our sympathy! It is this disparity and the sense of two forces in conflict that trouble the serenity and cause
the inconclusiveness of some of Hazlitt’s finest essays. They set out to give us a proof and they end by giving us a
picture. We are about to plant our feet upon the solid rock of Q.E.D., and behold the rock turns to quagmire and we are
knee-deep in mud and water and flowers. “Faces pale as the primrose with hyacinthine locks” are in our eyes; the woods
of Tuderly breathe their mystic voices in our ears. Then suddenly we are recalled, and the thinker, austere, muscular,
and sardonic, leads us on to analyse, to dissect, and to condemn.

Thus if we compare Hazlitt with the other great masters in his line it is easy to see where his limitations lie. His
range is narrow and his sympathies few if intense. He does not open the doors wide upon all experience like Montaigne,
rejecting nothing, tolerating everything, and watching the play of the soul with irony and detachment. On the contrary,
his mind shut hard with egotistic tenacity upon his first impressions and froze them to unalterable convictions. Nor
was it for him to make play, like Lamb, with the figures of his friends, creating them afresh in fantastic flights of
imagination and reverie. His characters are seen with the same quick sidelong glance full of shrewdness and suspicion
which he darted upon people in the flesh. He does not use the essayist’s licence to circle and meander. He is tethered
by his egotism and by his convictions to one time and one place and one being. We never forget that this is England in
the early days of the nineteenth century; indeed, we feel ourselves in the Southampton Buildings or in the inn parlour
that looks over the downs and on to the high road at Winterslow. He has an extraordinary power of making us
contemporary with himself. But as we read on through the many volumes which he filled with so much energy and yet with
so little love of his task, the comparison with the other essayists drops from us. These are not essays, it seems,
independent and self-sufficient, but fragments broken off from some larger book — some searching enquiry into the
reason for human actions or into the nature of human institutions. It is only accident that has cut them short, and
only deference to the public taste that has decked them out with gaudy images and bright colours. The phrase which
occurs in one form or another so frequently and indicates the structure which if he were free he would follow —“I will
here try to go more at large into the subject and then give such instances and illustrations of it as occur to me”—
could by no possibility occur in the Essays of Elia or Sir Roger de Coverley. He loves to grope among the curious
depths of human psychology and to track down the reason of things. He excels in hunting out the obscure causes that lie
behind some common saying or sensation, and the drawers of his mind are well stocked with illustrations and arguments.
We can believe him when he says that for twenty years he had thought hard and suffered acutely. He is speaking of what
he knows from experience when he exclaims, “How many ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep and intense, often
pass through the mind in only one day’s thinking or reading!” Convictions are his life-blood; ideas have formed in him
like stalactites, drop by drop, year by year. He has sharpened them in a thousand solitary walks; he has tested them in
argument after argument, sitting in his corner, sardonically observant, over a late supper at the Southampton Inn. But
he has not changed them. His mind is his own and it is made up.

Thus however threadbare the abstraction — Hot and Cold, or Envy, or The Conduct of Life, or The Picturesque and the
Ideal — he has something solid to write about. He never lets his brain slacken or trusts to his great gift of
picturesque phrasing to float him over a stretch of shallow thought. Even when it is plain from the savagery and
contempt with which he attacks his task that he is out of the mood and only keeps his mind to the grindstone by strong
tea and sheer force of will, we still find him mordant and searching and acute. There is a stir and trouble, a vivacity
and conflict in his essays as if the very contrariety of his gifts kept him on the stretch. He is always hating,
loving, thinking, and suffering. He could never come to terms with authority or doff his own idiosyncrasy in deference
to opinion. Thus chafed and goaded the level of his essays is extraordinarily high. Often dry, garish in their bright
imagery, monotonous in the undeviating energy of their rhythm — for Hazlitt believed too implicitly in his own saying,
“mediocrity, insipidity, want of character, is the great fault”, to be an easy writer to read for long at a stretch —
there is scarcely an essay without its stress of thought, its thrust of insight, its moment of penetration. His pages
are full of fine sayings and unexpected turns and independence and originality. “All that is worth remembering of life
is the poetry of it.” “If the truth were known, the most disagreeable people are the most amiable.” “You will hear more
good things on the outside of a stage-coach from London to Oxford, than if you were to pass a twelve-month with the
undergraduates or heads of colleges of that famous University.” We are constantly plucked at by sayings that we would
like to put by to examine later.

But besides the volumes of Hazlitt’s essays there are the volumes of Hazlitt’s criticism. In one way or another,
either as lecturer or reviewer, Hazlitt strode through the greater part of English literature and delivered his opinion
of the majority of famous books. His criticism has the rapidity and the daring, if it has also the looseness and the
roughness, which arise from the circumstances in which it was written. He must cover a great deal of ground, make his
points clear to an audience not of readers but of listeners, and has time only to point to the tallest towers and the
brightest pinnacles in the landscape. But even in his most perfunctory criticism of books we feel that faculty for
seizing on the important and indicating the main outline which learned critics often lose and timid critics never
acquire. He is one of those rare critics who have thought so much that they can dispense with reading. It matters very
little that Hazlitt had read only one poem by Donne; that he found Shakespeare’s sonnets unintelligible; that he never
read a book through after he was thirty; that he came indeed to dislike reading altogether. What he had read he had
read with fervour. And since in his view it was the duty of a critic to “reflect the colours, the light and shade, the
soul and body of a work”, appetite, gusto, enjoyment were far more important than analytic subtlety or prolonged and
extensive study. To communicate his own fervour was his aim. Thus he first cuts out with vigorous and direct strokes
the figure of one author and contrasts it with another, and next builds up with the freest use of imagery and colour
the brilliant ghost that the book has left glimmering in his mind. The poem is re-created in glowing phrases —“A rich
distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a golden cloud envelops it; a honeyed paste of poetic
diction encrusts it, like the candied coat of the auricula”. But since the analyst in Hazlitt is never far from the
surface, this painter’s imagery is kept in check by a nervous sense of the hard and lasting in literature, of what a
book means and where it should be placed, which models his enthusiasm and gives it angle and outline. He singles out
the peculiar quality of his author and stamps it vigorously. There is the “deep, internal, sustained sentiment” of
Chaucer; “Crabbe is the only poet who has attempted and succeeded in the STILL LIFE of tragedy”. There is nothing
flabby, weak, or merely ornamental in his criticism of Scott — sense and enthusiasm run hand in hand. And if such
criticism is the reverse of final, if it is initiatory and inspiring rather than conclusive and complete, there is
something to be said for the critic who starts the reader on a journey and fires him with a phrase to shoot off on
adventures of his own. If one needs an incentive to read Burke, what is better than “Burke’s style was forked and
playful like the lightning, crested like the serpent”? Or again, should one be trembling on the brink of a dusty folio,
the following passage is enough to plunge one in midstream:

It is delightful to repose on the wisdom of the ancients; to have some great name at hand, besides one’s own
initials always staring one in the face; to travel out of one’s self into the Chaldee, Hebrew, and Egyptian characters;
to have the palm-trees waving mystically in the margin of the page, and the camels moving slowly on in the distance of
three thousand years. In that dry desert of learning, we gather strength and patience, and a strange and insatiable
thirst of knowledge. The ruined monuments of antiquity are also there, and the fragments of buried cities (under which
the adder lurks) and cool springs, and green sunny spots, and the whirlwind and the lion’s roar, and the shadow of
angelic wings.

Needless to say that is not criticism. It is sitting in an armchair and gazing into the fire, and building up image
after image of what one has seen in a book. It is loving and taking the liberties of a lover. It is being Hazlitt.

But it is likely that Hazlitt will survive not in his lectures, nor in his travels, nor in his Life of Napoleon, nor
in his Conversations of Northcote, full as they are of energy and integrity, of broken and fitful splendour and
shadowed with the shape of some vast unwritten book that looms on the horizon. He will live in a volume of essays in
which is distilled all those powers that are dissipated and distracted elsewhere, where the parts of his complex and
tortured spirit come together in a truce of amity and concord. Perhaps a fine day was needed, or a game of fives or a
long walk in the country, to bring about this consummation. The body has a large share in everything that Hazlitt
writes. Then a mood of intense and spontaneous reverie came over him; he soared into what Patmore called “a calm so
pure and serene that one did not like to interrupt it”. His brain worked smoothly and swiftly and without consciousness
of its own operations; the pages dropped without an erasure from his pen. Then his mind ranged in a rhapsody of
well-being over books and love, over the past and its beauty, the present and its comfort, and the future that would
bring a partridge hot from the oven or a dish of sausages sizzling in the pan.

I look out of my window and see that a shower has just fallen: the fields look green after it, and a rosy cloud
hangs over the brow of the hill; a lily expands its petals in the moisture, dressed in its lovely green and white; a
shepherd-boy has just brought some pieces of turf with daisies and grass for his young mistress to make a bed for her
skylark, not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn — my cloudy thoughts draw off, the storm of angry politics has
blown over — Mr. Blackwood, I am yours — Mr. Croker, my service to you — Mr. T. Moore, I am alive and well.

There is then no division, no discord, no bitterness. The different faculties work in harmony and unity. Sentence
follows sentence with the healthy ring and chime of a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil; the words glow and the sparks
fly; gently they fade and the essay is over. And as his writing had such passages of inspired description, so, too, his
life had its seasons of intense enjoyment. When he lay dying a hundred years ago in a lodging in Soho his voice rang
out with the old pugnacity and conviction: “Well, I have had a happy life.” One has only to read him to believe it.